30 September 2005

They say good sailors are mathematical

A recent thread on the Sailing Anarchy forums made it obvious that a high percentage of sailors come from a technical/analytical background. Something to do with figuring the dozens of factors involved in making a sailboat move I would assume. And that's my lame ass attempt to make this post sailing related.

The truth is, my daughter rocks and all of y'all should know about this. Camille has addition and subtraction down cold with sums up to ten. I figured that I'd shown her the concept and it was up to some highly-paid teacher to get her past that number ten barrier.

But then one day, I'm perusing her Hello Kitty notebook and see that she's computed 8+7=15. How in the world did she figure that one out by herself? I go ask her and she says (with a little grin) she counted it on her fingers. My daughter is no freak, she only has ten fingers, but I checked that anyway just to be sure. After they added up, she scurried off to her craft table and brought back a sheet with her work:

She had drawn hands with more fingers to help her count. That rocks! If Mohammed can't go to the mountain, bring the mountain to Mohammed.

Although your daughter is going to need a lot more fingers to do vector calculus.

When my daughter was about 5 years old, she could spell just as fast backwards as forwards. I think she just saw the words as pictures in her mind. Left-to-right or right-to-left made no difference to her.